Top tip: literature, data use and how it's all linked

How to search and browse through 5,000 pieces of GBIF-relevant literature, and find the papers that your dataset enabled

Since 2008 the GBIF Secretariat has been tracking the use of GBIF-mediated data in research literature. Though often limited to articles in scientific, peer-reviewed journals, citations of GBIF datasets and downloads also make their way into other types of publications, including academic dissertations, environmental impact assessments, books, technical reports, and a wide range of websites.

The literature tracking programme involves categorizing literature at a high level (type of literature, relevance to GBIF, peer-review status, etc.) and also at a finer level (topics, countries of focus/researchers, GBIF use, etc.). Once an item has been validated and properly categorized, we add it to the literature index and it becomes visible and searchable on GBIF.org.

You can search for literature by keywords (e.g. words used in the title, author names, etc.) and a number of search facets. Here’s a few examples to illustrate how easy it is:

Linking literature to data

When researchers make use of data from GBIF.org in their studies, we strongly encourage them to use standard citations that include unique DOIs representing exactly the data they downloaded. This practice ensures proper attribution of data holders and publishers, and facilitates reproducibility of research. While the uptake of DOIs in data citations has been slow, it is steadily increasing. And with the new GBIF.org in place, we can use these citations to show links between scientific literature and data published in GBIF.org.

In literature searches, you can access papers by links to data either by a specific dataset or publisher. For example, let’s find all papers that used data in the Australia’s Virtual Herbarium dataset:

Direct links to such citations are also visible publisher and download pages. For example, the GBIF Benin publisher page: